Thursday, October 21, 2010

One Egg Tortilla de Patata... Ostrich Egg

It was an odd but extremely funny gift and of course presented a bit of a challenge as to what to do with it. I was very wary of going too straight forward, ie scrambled or fried egg as I wasn't sure if it would taste just like a chicken egg. I chose to make a one egg tortilla de patata. A quintissential spanish dish served in homes and bars around the country.
Basically it is cooked potato, onion and garlic salt and pepper set in egg. I added some chopped chorizo, and pancetta as well as a tsp of pimenton.
The first job was to open the egg. The family threw out reccomendations, hole saw, screwdriver, mallet, but we ended up scoring the top with a saw and cracking it open with a wooden pestle.

The egg cracked presented the contents still safely hidden behind a thick membrane (amniotic sac) which I cut into and then poured the egg into a large glass bowl. My wife about lost her lunch at that moment as the egg gurgled, squashed and slithered out of it's shell. I will post video at the end of the post cause it's not a very appetizing moment. Having said that she did take my daughter and go out to dinner instead of waiting for the tortilla. The white and yolk are very intermingled with an orangy color, It smelled sweet, almost with a hint of vanilla, strange but pleasant.
Ok then I was on my own from here. I peeled 4 yukon gold potatoes 2 onions and 6 cloves of garlic and diced them. I sauteed them in olive oil some chorizo and a tsp of pimenton.

and pancetta

I sauteed it till it was almost done, the potato still had a bit of crunch but barely. I seasoned this with salt and pepper.

I initially thought I could cook all this in my large cast iron skillet, but the side isn't very high... and I had a ton of egg. I decided to transfer it all to the oven and use my relatively new clay pot from La Tienda.
I put the empty cazuela in the oven and preheated the oven to 350. When both the oven and cazuela were at 350 I added another bit of olive oil to the pot, half the potato, the now scrambled egg and the rest of the potato.

I then increased the temp to 400 and cooked for 10 min. At 10 minutes I mixed the ingredients which were partially set and cooked for another 10 minutes. After the total 20 min it was set so I switched to low broil for 4 minutes till it looked like this.

I flipped it onto a serving platter (the tortilla is 12 inches in diameter)

I summoned some pac-man vibe with a slice

It tasted great, very close to a chicken egg, no longer sweetly fragrant as it was before but with a nice pimenton aroma. Clearly have a bunch left over for breakfast and some snacks.